Nova Blog

As marketers most of us use video to promote our services and products. The growing popularity of sites like youtube have led to a lot of people providing video creation services. Some are very professional and charge an arm and a leg for their services, while others make you decent quality videos using templates for as less as $27.

Today I want to tell you about 2 websites that I have come across that offer services that let you make professional quality videos and animation for youtube and other video sharing sites for free.

The first site is Animoto which lets you create professional quality videos that can be a max size of 30 seconds for free. If you want to make videos that are longer you need to sign up for a paid account that’s $30 a year or $249 a year depending on the package you choose.

If you are a big time youtube video marketer then the $249 package is still a steal as its less than a buck a day.

You can compare the packages here

So assuming you are using the freebie option, this is what youd do

1. Sign up for a free account
2. Choose to do a short 30-sec video (or a full length video if you are using their paid account)
3 Choose to upload images from your computer
Or pick one of the following services: Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, etc. Then wait a few mins when Animoto gets your images and processes them
Once it grabs your images you can choose to keep them all or delete the ones you don’t want
Next choose a song from their collection or upload your own.
Lastly finalize your video with a title and description and let Animoto works it’s magic.

Once you have the video ready and you are with the freebie option then let animoto upload it to your youtube account. ( Paid users have the option to download the video to their PC)

Now animoto adds 2 screens to the video it creates which you might want to get rid of.
The first is that it adds a credit to the artist whose music you chose from their library and the next is the “Created using animoto” screen that’s added at the end of the video.

If you are using their freebie option in a commercial venture ( LOL like we care ) then download the video from your youtube account to your PC using a site like Keepvid and then use a video editing software like camtasia studio to edit out the last few frames so that you get rid of the animoto branding, produce the video again and voila, you have a professional quality video created for free in under 10 minutes.

One cool thing I noticed is that depending on the style of the music you choose the video effects change. If you use an electronic funk style of music then the effects are very different from say using country music. So experiment with it and you’ll see what I mean.

And another cool option is that if you don’t like the video it creates you can run the creation process again and it will create a brand new video using the same images, text and music.

So if two guys were to use the exact same images, text and music, the end result video would be entirely different in both cases…. simply amazing!

The second site I wanted to tell you about is a site called Memoov
This site lets you create small video clips using their toon templates and though the videos are not as sales oriented as the ones you can create using animoto, the USP of this site is that it lets you create little animated clips using cartoon characters. Hey these videos wont be impressive as ones made by the disney studio, but heck they can sure give sitepal.com a run for their money.

Check out this promo videothey have made.. a spoof on michael phleps LOL

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with th e arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers, he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes, so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work o ut the amounts each should pay.

And so: The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings)
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘W hy should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier

Two weeks ago, almost after a year of not posting on this blog, I decided to update my wordpress install and use a new template. During this process I noticed that in the view source of my wordpress installation on this blog there were about 200 odd links pointing to various pills/male sexual enhancement sites which was only visible in the HTML source.

The hacker had used a invisible div tag to hold the links, so I guess the googlebot chomped up all those links and its a little wonder that my pagerank for this blog dropped 2 spots in the last update.

The links still show up in the google serps

Still don’t know which hack the f**ker used, but I came across this nice post at Aarons site and since have implemented those safety measures. Damn, I’m a software professional and if I got so careless, I wonder how many folk get their wordpress installs hacked each day

If you are a internet marketer who uses his or her own server with a mailing software like interspire or auto response plus, you may have noted that over the past few years the number of open rates for your mailing must have drastically reduced.

I have been using a self hosted email system to send mail to all my clients. The main reason for this was that I always felt that double optin broke the marketing flow. Hosted email solutions like aweber or constantcontact to name a few force you to use double optins.

I mean, say a person buys one of my software and I want to add him to my optin list, using a double optin would mean me sending him a confirmation mail and then expect him to click that link and then get the unlock key.

This in my opinion would piss off most people, which then got me thinking “Hey these guys are using a mail software just like mine, and i’m not sending any mail about viagra or penis enlargement, so why would their deliverability be better than mine?”

After a little research and implementation of these steps on own mail server, ive almost doubled my open rates and my mail almost never ends up in the bulk folder at yahoo, gmail etc

Things you need to do

1) Ask your host to enable reverse DNS on your box

2) Set up SPF( sender policy framework) records on your server:
This is one of the ways that hosts check if the mail is indeed sent from the server it claims to be sent from. If you are running cpanel then you can do this yourself without your hosts help. Here is an article on how to do that.

3) Set up DomainKeys: Domain keys is a public/private key system that was started by Yahoo and is now used both by Yahoo as well as Gmail to check if the mail was indeed sent from the domain it claims to be sent from.
This is one of the next most important thing to do after setting up your reverse DNS.
For a quick tutorial on how to set up domain keys visit this site

4) Senderid: This is a system that’s followed by microsoft, but if you have the 3 steps I outlined earlier, your mail should sail through

5) Every few mailings check if your servers IP is in any DNS based blacklists using a tool like mxtoolbox and if it is then mail the admins at those sites and explain your situation to them. Most are always ready to help out.

6) Getting included in email deliverability services: Sites like suretymail, habeas, goodmail and senderscore aer third party accreditation sites that work closely with ISP’s and ensure that your mail gets delivered. When you sign up at these sites, your servers IP is included in their database, and the ISP’s check these databases, and if they find your IP in there then your mail gets delivered. This of these as opposites of blacklists

But note that these services arent all that cheap. For example goodmail charges per 1000 mail sent, and others like suretymail though only charge $10 per month, charge you $500 as setup charges.

So in conclusion, if you follow the first 5 of the 6 simple steps I’ve talked about, your mail will land up in your prospects inbox for sure